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Deviant Behavior
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To cite this article: Patricia A. Adler & Peter Adler (2006): The Deviance Society,
Deviant Behavior, 27:2, 129-148
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15330150500468444
It has been over a decade since Sumner (1994) rang the death
knell for the sociology of deviance. Two notable scholars, in
particular, have debated the vibrancy of the field, from the
liveliness of its empirical and theoretical contributions to
Received 16 May 2005; accepted 25 July 2005
A slightly different version of this paper was presented at a special thematic session,
Impoverished, Dead or Morally Corrupt: Should There Be a Sociology of Deviance? at
the 2005 annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Philadelphia, PA.
Address correspondence to Patricia Adler, Department of Sociology, 327 UCB, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0327. E-mail: adler@colorado.edu
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the heart of the sociological enterprise. Deviance is not marginal, it is central to what we do.
We invite you to conduct exit interviews with your undergraduate sociology majors. Invariably, when you ask them
what concepts they remember, theyll tell you Mertons
(1938) five modes of adaptation, Sykes and Matzas (1957)
techniques of neutralization, Beckers (1953) stages of
becoming a marijuana user, Hirschis (1969) elements of control theory, or Goffmans (1963) dichotomy of the discredited
and discreditable. Theyll remember their most favorite
books, like Anderson and Snows Down on their Luck
(1993), Sanders Marks of Mischief (1988), Ehrenreichs
Nickel and Dimed (2001), the public ethnographies of Anderson (Code of the Streets, 1999; Streetwise, 1990), Duneier
(Sidewalk, 1999), and Newman (No Shame in Their Game,
1999), Bests enlightening expose, Threatened Children
(1990), or our own insider account of drug smugglers, Wheeling & Dealing (1985). Even recently, award-winning works by
Hays (Flat Broke with Children, 2003), Altheide (Creating
Fear, 2002), and Pager (The Mark of a Criminal Record,
2002), speak to elements of deviance in one way or another.
People continue to be mesmerized by the proliferation of
crime dramas on television. All highlight, legitimize, denigrate, or celebrate deviant behavior in one form or another.
Clearly deviance is percolating in the public mind.
One of the hallmarks of any society is its changing definitions of deviance, with fluctuations occurring over time and
variations existing between groups. As sociologists have long
known but Moynihan (1993) and Krauthammer (1993) rearticulated, all societies change the boundaries around what
is considered deviant, defining it down when they have
more deviance than they can handle, and defining it up
when they want to point to problematic issues. Matthews
and Wacker (2002) discussed the way ideas move from
deviance into the core as they start on the fringe, moving first
to the edge, then to the realm of the cool, into the next big
thing, and finally becoming social convention. This is one
of the dynamics that so fascinate sociologists: the
deviance-making andunmakingprocess.
We see no need to re-hash completely the arguments
our distinguished colleagues have advanced. Rather, we
would like to take this space to focus on another aspect of
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international laws and the Geneva Convention, were facilitated by defining the detainees as deviant, as other, and
as sub-human. Part-time reservist soldiers, under prodding
from military police, brutalized their captives, becoming
themselves deviant.
Our country was also subject to a variety of drug-related
moral panics. Musto (1999) has noted that drug use and
enforcement trends seem to cycle periodically, swinging
back and forth between states of relative permissiveness
and prohibition. Following the lax sixties and seventies,
the eighties and nineties brought crack-downs. Largescale fears erupted, especially over crack cocaine and
ecstasy, leading to overwrought citizens and factually exaggerated assertions (Reinarman and Levine 1997). Consumers,
in fear, fled to other, potentially more dangerous, drugs such
as methamphetamine and ice for the former, heroin and HCL
cocaine for the latter. Law enforcement officials turned a war
on drugs into a war on inner-city residents, a war on people
of color, and a war on immigrants. Alcohol also took its
share of the spotlight, with cases of drinking deaths on college campuses leading administrators to legislate new rules
on rushing, hazing, private parties, and underage drinking.
Fears were fueled by media portrayals of students on spring
breaks engaging in excessive drinking and wanton sex.
Applications declined at identified party schools, as parents feared for their childrens lives and three-strike
policies were reduced to two-strikes.
We also went through cycles of food and body panics with
some periodic regularity, as new and dangerous foods were
identified only to be re-cast a few years later as beneficial.
We have seen the rise and fall of cholesterol-laden foods,
carbohydrates, proteins, grains, trans-fats, fiber, sugar, antioxidants, and various additives. Both the foods and the
people who ate them were labeled deviant. We were cast as
a supersized, obese nation, but then told that a little
fat could make us live longer (Smith 2004). Anorexia and
bulimia blossomed, becoming one of our largest cultural
exports. Cosmetic surgery continued to climb. These food
and body panics cycled and contradicted each other in such
a way that our whole nation ultimately became very
confused about what was deviant and wrong, and what was
current scientific thinking.
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OWNERSHIP OF DEVIANCE
Controlling the ability to define deviance is a valuable asset
in our society, and we have witnessed a fervent interdisciplinary struggle between sociology, psychology, criminology, and medicine over the ownership of deviance as a
social problem. These struggles begin with establishing
dominance over the ability to label phenomena. Goode
(2004) and Best (2004a) alerted us to the propensity for
criminology to steal the domain of deviance from sociology.
This was possible because sociology serves as a parent
discipline, spawning substantive spin-offs (womens studies,
ethnic studies, gerontology) that still overlap considerably with
us, their generating area. This has led to domain contests
between the original and the breakaway fields. As criminology
arose, it portioned off a chunk of our subject matter. When one
looks at the relationship between crime and deviance there is
clearly an area within each that stands apart from the other, but
there is also a sizeable area of common ground. Through its
more narrow focus, its practical application, its self-presentation as a quantitative science and its tie-ins to the world of
grant funding, criminology has generated a vibrancy and prestige that has attracted large numbers of students, practitioners,
and policy-makers. It has seized the area of overlap as its own
as well, leaving only, for practical purposes, the domain of
non-criminal deviance to the field of sociology. Sociological
contributions to the field of crime, law, and deviance are,
and continue to be, rich. Yet, as Goode noted, when criminology split from deviance it adopted a positivist paradigm
and left behind the social constructionist perspective. Although
the latter is a vital approach and introduces powerful insights
on relativity into a world governed too often by absolutes, its
very relativism makes it fuzzy. Criminologists, with their selfreport surveys and statistics, have gained greater legitimacy,
resources, and adherents.
In reality, however, psychology and psychiatry have made
the most successful encroachments into the domain of sociological deviance. Armed with their professions official guide,
the Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM-IV), practitioners
have defined various socially deviant behaviors as emotional
and mental illnesses. Has the Internet become too popular?
Psychiatrists have created the Internet addiction disorder,
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Illicit Markets
First, a range of deviance has been made available over the
Web to people who would not ordinarily have access to it.
People with hidden identities or in remote locations can
access illicit markets who would not otherwise be able
to locate them, finding deviant goods and services to
buy, sell, or trade. For example, all sorts of stolen items
are offered for sale on the Internet through both normal
channels such as eBay and through other, deviant sites.
Many of these are not traceable to their source, such as
electronics, stamps and coins, art, and gemstones or jewelry. Youngsters have become criminals with rationalizations as creative as Cresseys (1953) embezzlers 50 years
ago, pirating items that are copied and sold illegally, a
problem plaguing the entertainment industry that includes
CDs, DVDs, movies, television shows, music, concerts,
and pilfered cable television service=boxes. We have seen
a rise in the flow of pharmaceuticals from one country to
another, where American buyers are able to obtain drugs
from Canada, Mexico, the offshore Caribbean, or other
locations, with or without a prescription, and to buy
unlimited amounts of drugs such as painkillers from illicit
drug mills. People are also able to get intoxicating substances that are banned in the United States, such as herbal ecstasy, steroids, and hosts of others that may be legal
in some places but not others.
International markets can be found on the Internet for
pornography, sexual services, underage liaisons, prostitution,
tearooms, sex slaves, immigrant brides, illegal immigrant
smuggling, and various types of people. Teenage boys fantasies of naked women are now replaced with hardcore videos
of every conceivable sex act readily available. Interested
purchasers can find illegal adoptions, surrogate mothers, egg
donors, organ donors, organ thieves, nationally forbidden animals, endangered species, and illegal gambling.
The ease with which people can disguise their postings,
their responses, their identities, popping up and disappearing
at a moments notice, makes this medium much easier
for criminals with technical expertise to navigate, hiding
their trails from the law and=or operating outside of national
jurisdictions.
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Internet Fraud
Second, the Web is a source for the easy transmission of
fraud, with individuals and groups having new ways to
access unsuspecting users. Many offers, posing as either
deviant or legitimate exchanges, turn out to be scams where
victims are fleeced. Some of these involve stocks, where sellers offer securities for sale that turn out to be bogus. Other
stock frauds involve people offering fake accounts of their
securities successes, where they use fictitious names to send
optimistic or pessimistic messages to investing chat rooms
about stocks, hailing or bemoaning these companies. In
reality, these scammers buy or sell the stocks they intend
to manipulate right before they post, and then unload after
they have sent the price up or down (Barboza 1998; Morgensen 2000; Wyatt 1999).
Travel scams abound on the Web as well, with offers of
free trips abundant. Prospective participants are notified of
free trips that then turn out to have hidden costs such as fees
to reserve their trips, to pay agent-processing fees, or to
buy required memberships. Some pay the fees, never get
the trips, and are unable to get their money back. Other
card mill scams sell bogus travel agency credentials purportedly enabling buyers to get travel agent discounts on
transportation and lodging, at a time when both airlines and
hotels have begun to tighten up on the availability of such
discounts for legitimate travel agents while training their
employees to weed out fake travel agents. Finally, people
use online auctions to offer purportedly expiring frequent
flyer miles or tickets purchased under someone elses name,
which then turn out to be non-transferable (Johnston 2000).
Identity theft has risen to stellar proportions, with hackers
downloading credit and debit card numbers from banks,
credit reference companies, Western Union financial transfers, and such vendors as Amazon, eBay, Microsoft, and
VISA (Stellin 2000). Phishing, a form of online fraud in
which victims disclose account passwords and other data
in response to e-mails that seem to come from legitimate
business, has prospered, targeting users of a number of sites,
especially eBay (Austen 2005). Beyond this we have seen the
rise of pharming, where experienced hackers are able to
redirect people from a legitimate site to a bogus site without
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Internet Communities
Third, the Web has provided a place where previously nonexisting deviant subcultures can flourish. People involved in
what might otherwise be solitary forms of deviance such as
sexual asphyxiates, self-injurers, anorectics and bulimics,
computer hackers, depressives, pedophiles, and others,
now have the opportunity to go on-line and find international cyber communities populated 24=7 by a host of like
others. These websites offer chatrooms, newsgroups, email
discussion lists, and message boards for individuals to post
where they can seek the advice and cyber-company of
others. Some, such as the proana (anorexia) and promia
(bulimia) sites explicitly state that they reinforce and support
the deviant behavior, regarding this as a lifestyle choice
(Force 2005). Others, such as many self-injury sites, purport
to help users desist from their deviance, but may actually end
up reinforcing it by providing a supportive and accepting
community where individuals can go when they feel misunderstood and rejected by the outside world.
Whether the sites aim to reinforce or discourage the
deviance, nearly all tend to serve several unintended functions
that have significant consequences for participants. First, they
transmit knowledge of a practical and ideological sort among
people, enabling them to more effectively engage in and
legitimate the behavior. This helps people learn new variants
of their activities, how to carry them out, how to obtain
medical or legal services, and how to deal with outsiders.
Second, they tend to be leveling, bringing people together into
a common discourse regardless of their age, gender, marital
status, ethnicity, or socio-economic status (although users do
need a computer, and most have high-speed Internet access).
Third, they bridge huge spans of geographic distance, putting
Americans in contact with English-speaking people from
the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and all over the
world.
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CONCLUSION
Deviance is one of the core concepts of sociology, cutting
across and being integrated into our major theories and substantive fields. When we think of deviance, we refer not only
to attitudes, behavior, and conditions that lie outside the
margins of acceptability, but to the very norms that cast them
out, to the power structures of how folkways, mores, and
laws are created, and to the way that social control is
attempted and achieved. Deviance is involved in key processes by which social order is maintained, as affirmations
and re-affirmations of collective sentiment enhance social
solidarity and stability. Deviance is also critically engaged
in the dynamics of social change, as ideas and behavior
move around and go in and out of currency. Finally, it is central to the hierarchy of social stratification, as it enables individuals and groups to raise themselves up and strike down
their adversaries.
Deviance can represent both a serious and a light-hearted
concept, can be found in both the social health and social
ills of society, and, despite disciplinary turf wars, can
be approached from both positivistic and constructionist
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